The challenges of mail delivery within the United States and in the growing ranks of industrialized countries has grown so that in the United States alone, the postal service delivers upwards of 900 million pieces of mail per day. Added to the growing postal burden are the requirements of keeping address data accurate and readable by both mail handling machines and the mail carriers that physically deliver the mail. With the need to reduce costs while improving the efficiency and reliability of postal operations, continuous review of the methodology and the systems used to implement operations is required. Thus, the growing burden of delivering mail efficiently results in the development of regulations by the United States Postal Service (USPS) that are designed to take the best possible advantage of the technology available for mail handling.
Among the changes and requirements instituted by the United States Postal Service is the Information-Based Indicia Program (IBIP). Companies, such as the present assignee, are developing and introducing new document printing and handling systems that comply with the IBIP standards and criteria set by the USPS. As printing, post-processing and mailing technologies have become more sophisticated, separate processes for document preparation and distribution have emerged, particularly in high speed, high volume document production and mailing systems. New printing technology has introduced new standards and new print languages to accommodate complex printing functions. Mail finishing requirements, such as bar codes and different coding methodologies, have become more data dependent; for example, encoding destination identification. Sorting and inclusion of targeted marketing documents, information and precisional communication documents have further increased the complexity of document production and mailing systems. Companies that generate such mail on a regular basis typically need to change their specific application each time the postal regulations change and also change the data format to accommodate newer technology printers. Applicant's print stream processing technology, for example, generally known by the trademark StreamWeaver®, substantially eliminates the need to modify existing applications to accommodate the changes in postal regulations and to accommodate newer printing technologies by addressing the changes further downstream in the document preparation cycle. Generally, however, the documents and addresses are generated by legacy or application-specific programs designed to operate with the document production system.
The advent of personal computers and high-quality printers has led to a number of third-party word processing application programs that have the capability to generate an addressed, matched mailing wherein the document is matched with the envelope address using the mail merge capabilities of the application. PC applications such as Microsoft Word generate mail using printer-generated indicia on commercially available printers. It would be desirable to use such third party applications in high volume document processing and mail systems such as, for example, the ADDRESSRIGHT® printing system produced by applicant without programmatically altering the third party application to accommodate the printer drivers of the printing system.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide a method and an apparatus for printing Information Based Indicia Program (IBIP) postage in a printing subsystem using the mail merge capabilities of a third-party word processing software application.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for formatting an envelope and verifying and correcting the destination address prior to printing.